Dead Watch Page 6

  “What’s there to be scared about?”

  Goodman was deadly serious now: “Come on, man.”

  Jake shrugged. “All right.”

  Goodman pointed him at a chair in a conversation group, slumped in one opposite. “Jake: I’m sure you’ve been researching me, so you probably know my stump speech. This country is at a crossroads. We are losing the thing that makes us American. The idea is what holds us together: the idea in the Declaration, the idea in the Constitution. But the people running the country now—not the president, he’s a good man—but the Congress, and these people flooding across our borders, the South Americans, the Caribs, the Africans, the Arabs, they have one thing in common: they’re out to rip this country for whatever they can get out of it. End of story. They don’t care about freedom of speech, freedom of religion, all the rest of it . . . Well, like I said, you know the stump speech.”

  “I do.” Jake waited.

  “We’re the counterpressure against those things. People are constantly trying to bring us down, to shut us up. Bowe was one of those people. And he wasn’t fair about it—he wasn’t willing to take you on in open debate. He’d use any little piece of dirt he could find, real or imagined, to malign anyone on the other side of the question. He’d do anything . . . which was one reason we’d never do anything aimed at him. We’d never give him an excuse. Now this.” Goodman turned away and looked out his office window, toward the capitol. “Do you know Madison Bowe?”

  “I’ve met her.”

  “So have I,” Goodman said, grinning. “She’s quite the little package. Tits and ass and brains and, worst of all, professional camera training. Did you know she used to be a reporter here in Richmond? Pretty hot, too.”

  “I saw something in her biography,” Jake said.

  “And now, she’s your basic political nightmare, if you’re on the wrong end of things,” Goodman said. “If she’d married me, instead of Bowe, I’d be the president by now.” He laughed and turned back to his desk. Chatter done. “So what does Bill Danzig want? You’re doing what? An investigation? An inquiry?”

  “A search,” Jake suggested. “Ordered by the president. Bowe is being used to hammer you and we’re getting the ricochets. It’s getting worse. We’ve got the convention coming up.”

  “If there weren’t any ricochets, would they still be worried?” Goodman asked.

  He was teasing, and Jake had to laugh. “Worried, but less worried,” he said.

  “That’s what I figured. Danzig doesn’t take his eye off the ball,” Goodman said. “So, what specifically are you going to do?”

  “I’m gonna find him—Lincoln Bowe—one way or another. I’m bringing in some FBI heavyweights. I may go to Homeland Security, the Secret Service, whatever. I’m going to squeeze. Some of your Watchmen, among other people.”

  “Mmm.” Goodman peered at Jake for a moment, weighing him. Then, “We had nothing to do with the disappearance of Lincoln Bowe. You should convey that to the president.”

  Jake said, “Are you talking for yourself, or the whole state of Virginia?”

  Goodman was irritated. “For myself and the people around me. I obviously can’t speak for everybody.”

  “Mrs. Bowe says the Watchmen are involved. And after the incident at her house . . .”

  “That was a mistake made by a low-level Watchman, and he has been thoroughly counseled on his mistake,” Goodman said. “I’ve sent a letter of apology to Mrs. Bowe, with my personal guarantee that she can return to her farm with no fear of any interference. She has an absolute right to do that as an American. The Watchmen are not thugs, and we don’t tolerate any thuggishness.”

  “You can understand her fear . . .”

  “And perhaps you can understand ours, and why that poor dumbass Watchman did what he did,” Goodman said, now with some heat. “She has been throwing mud at us, just like her husband did. Calling us Nazis, telling people that we’re no better than the Klan. Slandering fine people who are only trying to heave this country up out of the mess that people like Lincoln Bowe got us into. Now, she’s trying to claim that we kidnapped her husband and probably killed him. It’s utter, errant nonsense.”

  “Governor, nobody ever thought you would have given an order to get rid of Lincoln Bowe. You’re far too smart for that . . .”

  “I’m too moral for that,” Goodman interjected.

  “I’m absolutely willing to believe you,” Jake said. “But what if some Watchman somewhere decided that he’d had enough? Who thought he’d be doing you a favor? Like this guy who went to Mrs. Bowe’s house? Somebody who believes in direct action?”

  Goodman: “You know John Patricia? The Watchman director?”

  “I know who he is.”

  “We’ve had him looking for exactly that. We’ve had him talking to our organizers at the county level and even at the town level. Looking for anything that might point to a Watchman involvement with Bowe. So far, nothing. So far, we’ve been chasing our tails.”

  “So you’re looking.”

  “We are looking and we will continue to look,” Goodman said.

  “If you find anything, you will get in touch with me?” Jake asked.

  “We will. Or the FBI, if that’s appropriate.”

  They talked for another ten minutes, the governor adamant that Bowe’s disappearance must, in some way, have been brought about by Bowe himself—or maybe, though he didn’t believe it, was a routine crime gone bad, a robbery that turned into murder, with the body dumped in the woods.

  “But that . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t believe that. These guys he drove away with . . . they sound like feds, to me. He didn’t do anything that’d get him picked up by some, you know, intelligence organization, did he? I mean, he was on the Senate Intelligence Committee, he’d know all kinds of weird stuff.”

  “I don’t think so. Mrs. Bowe sort of agrees with you on this—she says the cause is close by. It’s no big international conspiracy.”

  “She’s right,” Goodman said. “But she thinks I did it, and I think Bowe did it. He’s involved somehow. He engineered this, and it’s working.”

  “You have no proof.”

  “No. Of course not. If I had it, I’d be shoving it down their throats.” Goodman smiled again, quickly. “Even if I didn’t have it, but I was pretty sure about it, I’d stuff it down their throats. But I got nothin’.”

  End of interview. They both stood up and Goodman reached out to shake hands again. “If you need anything, call Ralph. Any time of day or night,” Goodman said.

  “Thanks,” Jake said, and moved toward the door.

  Goodman asked to his back, “Would you do it again? The combat?”

  Jake stopped and nodded. “Yes. I would.”

  “Did you like it?” Goodman was grinning at him.

  “Yes. Judging from your question, you did, too.”

  “We’re a couple of unfashionable motherfuckers,” Goodman said, walking over to his desk. “Stay in touch, Jake.”

  Goines gave him a private cell-phone number and left Jake at the elevators. Jake was almost out of the building when a woman’s voice called to him: “Mr. Winter.”

  He looked to his left. The intern from Goodman’s office was standing in a side hallway. She held up a hand and folded her fingers toward herself. Jake stepped over. “Can I help you?”

  She was a tall blonde, a southern belle, busty, long legs, pink tongue touching her puffy lips. Her skirt and blouse cost somebody a couple of hundred bucks each, he thought, and her silk vest looked like Hermès. “There’s a man named Carl V. Schmidt in a town called Scottsville,” she said. “He’s a Watchman. Goodman and Patricia and Goines are worried about him. They’re trying to find him and they can’t. They think he might have something to do with Lincoln Bowe.”

  “Carl V. Schmidt.”

  “That’s right. I printed out his name and address.” She handed him a slip of paper. “My name’s on there, too. You can call me at the house.”
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  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I don’t like Arlo,” she said. “He’s crazy. He wants to be president, and that wouldn’t be good. He also wants to sleep with me. Which he won’t get to do.”

  Jake smiled at her. “You’re not worried about all this?”

  She shook her head and smiled back. “My old man’s got more money than Jesus Christ and he’s a big contributor. Arlo won’t lay a finger on me.”

  “But you work for Arlo . . . ,” Jake said, picking up her use of Goodman’s first name.

  “Because I’m a poli-sci major,” she said. “He’s nuts, but he’s the governor. He’s an opportunity. Anyway, check out Carl V. Schmidt, and if it comes to anything, remember my name, and get me a job. I’ll take anything in the White House. I work really hard and I’m really smart.”

  Jake nodded: “Thanks. If anything happens, I’ll call.”

  “Thank you.” She turned and tripped away, down the side hall. Jake looked after her for a moment, watching her ass, and she knew it without turning around. She lifted a hand and twiddled her fingers at him, good-bye.

  Very attractive, Jake thought, as he headed toward the door, and so young, for such treachery.

  In his office, the governor picked up a phone, tapped a number, said, “Give me a minute.”

  Darrell Goodman arrived two minutes later, from his cubbyhole office on the floor below. “I talked to Winter,” the governor said. “He’s doing what he said he was going to do: he’s jacking people up.”

  “Want us to track him?”

  “I can’t decide. There are some risks . . .”

  After a moment of silence, Darrell said, “I could probably get online access to Winter’s cell-phone account, the billing records. We wouldn’t know what he was saying, but we’d know where he was, and who he was talking to.”

  “What are the chances of getting caught?”

  “Nil. We monitor from a phantom account and do the access from public hot spots.”

  “Fuckin’ with a White House guy is different than fuckin’ with Howard Barber,” Arlo Goodman said.

  “Be a very light touch,” Darrell said.

  “Then do it,” Goodman said. He picked up a soft rubber exercise ball from his desk, pushed it between the fingers of his ruined right hand, tried to tense the fingers. “We’re getting behind here. We need somebody we can squeeze. We need him now.”

  Out on the street, Jake got on his cell phone and called Novatny at the FBI.

  “I’ve got a name for you. Could you run it? And could you find out where a town called Scottsville is? I think it’s over by Charlottesville, maybe south?” He explained about the tip, without identifying the girl who had given it to him. On the note, she’d given her name as Cathy Ann Dorn, along with a local Richmond phone number.

  While Novatny ran the name, Jake walked back to his car, edged back onto the streets, looking for an entrance to the interstate. Novatny called back: “Do you have any good reason to think this guy might be a problem?”

  “No—just that my source said that Goodman and Patricia are looking for him, and think he might be involved.”

  “So what are you going to do about him?”

  Jake frowned, said, “Hey, Chuck—what’s up? What’d you find?”

  “We found quite a bit on him. One of the things is, he’s got more guns than the National Guard.”

  “What else?”

  Carl V. Schmidt was a failed entrepreneur, Novatny said. He’d failed as an upholsterer, a dry cleaner, a cosmetics salesman, a limo driver, a lunch-van driver for construction sites, owner-operator of a security service, and twice as a real estate agent. Fifteen years earlier, he’d been given a general discharge from the navy, which wasn’t good. He tended to drink and fight, the navy reports said.

  He’d had property attached both by Virginia and the U.S. government, for failure to pay taxes. He’d worked off the debts, eventually, and currently was up-to-date. He’d once been charged with fraud, but apparently paid back the victim, and the charges had been dismissed.

  “He worked the MacCallum campaign, in the Senate election two years ago,” Novatny said. “There’s a notation in here . . .” He paused, apparently looking for it, then read, “Quote: Both the Murray and the Bowe campaigns complained that cars with their bumper stickers were systematically damaged. That seven houses in Lexington with Bowe yard signs were splashed with paint, apparently from paint balloons. Police questioned Schmidt and several others. All were released for lack of proof.”

  “The Macs were bad news, some of them,” Jake said. “Fruitcakes.”

  “He’s a member of a gun club and the NRA. He owns, let’s see, sixty-four guns,” Novatny said. He counted them out: “Fifteen rifles . . . ten shotguns . . . and thirty-nine handguns. Yeah, sixty-four. Jeez. The guns, let me see . . . mmm, they’re not collector items, they’re shooters.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “There’s nothing that suggests he ever had anything to do with Lincoln Bowe,” Novatny said. “If you think the tip is real, we could track him.”

  Jake hesitated, then said, “Let me think about it.”

  Novatny: “There’s a tendency for you political people to keep things off-the-record. I understand that, given your job. But if you’re gonna look into this yourself, take it easy. I’ve seen bios like this before. The guy could be a problem.”

  “Maybe if I eased up on him,” Jake suggested.

  “I don’t want to hear about it. Stay in touch. If you actually find a single thing that could tie him to Bowe, call us.”

  “Talk to you tonight,” Jake said. “Could you e-mail me that file? Like, right now?”

  “You’ll get it in two minutes,” Novatny said.

  A well-tended fiftyish matron was waiting at a stoplight and Jake pulled over, stepped out of the car: “Excuse me? Do you know if there’s a Starbucks around here?”

  She checked him out for a moment, looked at the Mercedes-Benz star on the front of the car, then smiled. Somebody of her own class: “If you go three blocks straight up this street, you’ll see a Pea-in-the-Pod shop. Turn right and go one block.”

  “Thanks.”

  The Starbucks was a hot spot. He parked, went inside, got a croissant and a grande latte, took his laptop from his briefcase and went online.

  The file was there. Along with the information on Schmidt, Novatny included a map of the Scottsville area, pinpointing Schmidt’s house just off Highway 20, and across the James River south of the town. Scottsville was, as Jake thought, south of Charlottesville.

  He finished eating, closed down the laptop, went to his car and pointed it out onto I-64.

  There is no easy way to get from Richmond to Scottsville. Jake took I-64 west to Zion Crossroads, then south through Palmyra to Fork Union, and then west into Scottsville. When he saw the town, he remembered going through it on trips south of Charlottesville along Lee’s route of retreat from Richmond to Appomattox, which was farther southwest.

  He actually didn’t remember the town so much—it had seemed to be a depressing place when he’d gone through before—as he remembered the bridge, a humped structure over the normally turbid James. Now, with all the rain they’d had in the spring, the river was rolling heavily against the bridge, showing some power.

  The bridge was on Highway 20, south. Schmidt lived on County Highway 747, which was more of a lane than a highway, running in a loop off Highway 20. The house itself, painted a faded turquoise with a dirty blue trim, was not much better than a shack, and was sited almost beneath a line of high-tension electric wires.

  An unpainted tin carport stood empty on the left side of the house, except for an old washer-dryer and a stack of two-by-fours. An ancient Ford tractor with rotting tires sat in a clump of weeds behind the house. An iron stake in the front yard, surrounded by a circular bald spot in the overgrown grass, suggested a large dog sometimes kept on a chain.

  No dog visible. The front blinds were
open. Could be a dog inside. From the road, he could see a sheet of white paper hanging on the door.

  In training for Afghanistan, Jake had taken a course in burglary—what the army called surreptitious entry—from an ex-burglar hired by the CIA. It turned out that surreptitious entry was not particularly practical in Afghanistan, but the training had been interesting.

  After three passes, he slowed and turned into Schmidt’s driveway.

  Just to knock, and maybe get a look at the door . . .

  The paper on the door was from the Watchmen: Carl: Please call in. We’ll be at headquarters until 5 o’clock. This is super-important. Dave Johnson, District Coordinator, Watchmen.

  The paper was limp with humidity, as though it had been on the door for a while.

  Jake knocked: no barking—but the door was probably the newest piece of the house, a solid chunk of wood with two small view windows and a big Schlage lock. His elementary burglary skills were not going to work with it.

  He walked around to the front. Same thing: old house, new door.

  He walked around to the carport again, knocked, called: “Anybody home?”

  The house was isolated, the occasional car buzzing by on Highway 20, out of sight, and the occasional bee from the weed patch out back. He took a quick trip around it. The house was set on a concrete-block foundation, so there might be a basement, but if so, it was windowless. The house windows were fairly high—Jake was tall, but their lower sills were almost chest high on him. The window glass was dirty enough that he couldn’t see much. Still, no barking, no sound from inside.

  The carport entry was obviously the main one. Jake remembered one more thing from the surreptitious-entry course. The instructor said, “A lot of people hide a key outside the house. If they’re going to do that, it’s gonna be in about one of nine places: repeat after me . . .”

  He found it in the wrecked washing machine, in the lint filter.

  The house was dim and smelled of old moldy wallpaper. The floorboards creaked underfoot as he walked through it. Once inside, there was no point in being casual: he hurried through, calling, “Hello? Hello? Mr. Schmidt?” No answer.